What to cut out from a deck?

I’ve been tooling with my Nega Duel deck lately (it’s here: https://doomedintentions.wordpress.com/2012/12/28/the-nega-dueling-deck/ ) and made quite a few changes to it. One thing I noticed is that it becomes increasingly hard to remove any cards from your deck to include new essential additions that you have encountered during your plays/goldfish. Sometimes, a card is ‘cool’ to have and sometimes you think it’s essential because it has pulled its weight in previous plays.

So how do you decide?

The most obvious answer is “go back to your deck feature basics” but sometimes, even that is not an easy guideline to follow. So my obvious answer is: bite the bullet and let go. If a card was whittled down to 1 copy, you might consider either:

a) Playing that 1 copy anyway.

b) Change it for a more useful Unique strategy/item.

c) Complete one of your 2 copy cards in the deck.

I’m currently keeping to choice (a) with my deck, because that little edge can really be game changing. I’m not one of those guys who believe in “need a complete playset of everything for consistency”, more like, I better have a versatile toolbox that I can sink my teeth into when I need it. But then again, when you have good/semi good card draw system you can afford a more toolbox-y approach.

p/s: I originally wrote this for L5R but it seems general enough that it can be applied to any game.